Mixed Emotions

I hate the cold.

Not a big fan of winter.

I sometimes wish I could live in a place where it was permanently 25 degrees celcius - just right, neither cold nor hot.

Yesterday was the most amazing fall day one could ever ask for. Sarah and I stepped outside in the morning to go to church and her question (as it usually is) was, "What's that noise?"

In the stillness of the morning, we could hear the soft bristle of leaves descending from their branches and blanketing the ground.

After church, we played in the crunchy yellow leaves and I took a million pictures, as I normally do, sans Sarah looking at the camera because she is sick of looking at me with a big chunk of black lens sticking out from my face.

It was warm even, for fall in Newfoundland, and we needed only our sweaters, and I couldn't even be annoyed that the falling leaves meant the approaching snow.

But this morning, I woke up late. It was so dark outside at 7:30 and I didn't believe the alarm when it sounded. In my sleep-muddled state, I shut the alarm off and fell back into my warm cozy bed. I woke again at 8:10, ran about in a mad frenzy for 10 minutes, and headed out the door.

I opened the door and stood for a moment in shock, as if it were impossible, with the day we had yesterday.

The ground was covered in white. Our trees were covered in white. The car was covered in white. My shoes would now be covered in white. Oh, my shoes! How I dread tucking you away in exchange for chunky winter boots.

And yet, as I sit here in the office and peer through my window, I still can't be upset at this onset of our coldest season. The spruce outside my window is beautifully laden with mounds of fluff and weighted down with its brown cones peaking out from the underside. The snow is coming down in giant clumps, straight from the heavens, like the cloud gods took a moment to weave the flakes together first, before sending them to earth.

Makes me want to sit and write a poem and I imagine it must be how the songwriter felt when he penned "Winter Wonderland". But mostly, it actually makes me want to go outside, spread my arms to the sky, tilt my head back, and taste the coolness of this, the approach of winter.